You can get pk-xxxxx and cert-xxxxx .pem files at:

https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html

this is *NOT* the same as the AWS Management Console.

the file pk-xxxxx file that you get from the AWS Management Console is the one that you would use to ssh into the instance:

ssh -i xxxxdownloaded_from_AWS_Management_Consolexxxx.pem root@ec2-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

This has been a massively painful stumbling block for someone unfamiliar with .pem files.

It is not only SOO… tempting… it’s often a great idea (no, I don’t work for AWS). Being able to make an instant image (backup) of an instance solves the backup issue… you can always scale to new hardware (instance size); now, with “stop instances,” you can bid on the computing you need, often reducing the cost by 40-50+%.

Its soooo tempting.

Connecting to Amazon Ec2 Cloud- Quick & Easy

Overview Amazon Web Services is a service from Amazon which provides the following tools that we’re using for BB Shield developers: S3 Simple, scalable,……

very interesting post on private data could.
http://bigdatamatters.com/bigdatamatters/2009/09/private-cloud-eucalyptus.html

http://afewtips-com.blogspot.com/2009/07/create-plone-instance-on-ec2-and-save.html

http://robrohan.com/2009/01/30/saving-a-customised-linux-amazon-instance-ec2-and-s3/

http://www.philchen.com/2009/05/19/how-to-save-a-snapshot-of-your-amazon-ec2-instance

FWIW, here’s an important note for anyone using a debian or ubuntu client to run the EC2 command line tools:

I discovered that you need to use Sun’s JRE (either downloaded and installed from java.sun.com or by specifying the Sun version in apt-get) and use that in the $JAVA_HOME definition, because the gnu “default-jre” package that comes with debian/ubuntu won’t work (discussion and more details here).